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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of reviving the global bioweapons arms race under the guise of vaccine development, taking aim at his role in expanding controversial gain-of-function research overseas.
In a recent interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Kennedy alleged that Fauci skirted a U.S. moratorium on bioweapons-related research by moving dangerous experiments offshore. “Anthony Fauci began essentially restarting the arms race, and the bioweapons arms race, and did it under the pretension of developing vaccines, because of the same science that you develop bioweapons and vaccines,” Kennedy claimed to Daily Mail.
Gain-of-function research involves altering pathogens to make them more deadly or transmissible—ostensibly for vaccine development, but critics argue it poses significant risks. The research gained renewed scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic, amid theories linking the virus’s origins to lab experimentation.
Kennedy cited a series of events from 2014 when, he claimed, “three of his bugs escaped” from Fauci-run labs in the U.S., prompting alarm among the scientific community. “President Obama declared a moratorium, but instead of shutting down his experiments, he moved them offshore, mainly to the Wuhan lab,” Kennedy said, referring to indirect federal funding that supported research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Kennedy also pointed to mounting government agency consensus on the lab-leak theory. “The CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Energy — all say that it is most likely that those experiments resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2019,” he said.
On Monday, former President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning gain-of-function research, with Kennedy at his side in the Oval Office. “It’s a big deal, could have been that we wouldn’t have had the problem we had if we had this done earlier,” Trump remarked, referencing the pandemic.
Kennedy echoed those sentiments during the signing ceremony. “It’s a kind of weapon that always has blowback,” he warned. “In all of the history of gain-of-function research we cannot point to a single good thing that’s come from it.”
He also questioned President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon Fauci just before leaving office. “I don’t know what was going on in Joe Biden’s head, but I think that Anthony Fauci probably asked for that pardon, knowing that he had some liabilities here that were more than reputational,” Kennedy said.
